SL Huang - Up and Coming - Stories by the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors

Chancery imagined bitter chocolate mousse with honeyed damsons, soufflé, and drowned cherries. She concentrated on the shape of the flavour and all the things that could slot into it, a jigsaw for her tongue, until her breathing settled and her heart stopped racing.

She placed the last three logs. "You just don’t like her."

"She wants to ruin things, take you away. Of course I don’t like her."

"Don’t be stupid. Why would she want that?"

"Not because she loves you, no matter what she says." He kicked some of the bark that had fallen from the logs as Chancery split them.

She shook her head. "I’ll make tea. We’ll try the biscuits I made this morning."

Hedron slouched to his feet, hat brushing the shed roof, and stuffed his hands back inside his smock. "I’m going to check the goats."

"Fine." No point arguing if he was in a sulk.

Hedron had brought her to the farm after he found her. It was self-sufficient in all the ways that mattered, and the farmhouse kitchen alone was the size of the flat she had shared with Annabel; they hadn’t been able to afford anything bigger. Back then, hardly anyone could.

Now, no one else wanted it.

It had happened suddenly. One day, everything was fine; the next, Annabel said she was leaving.

Annabel was the only one who had seen past the lack of eye contact, the silences that could last for days, the finicky obsessions and pedantry; the disability that wasn’t enough to get Chancery support in a world where everyone was expected to pull their weight. The wasted talent. She was the only person since Chancery’s mother died to make her feel safe and loved; the only one not to have been people .

She might as well have stabbed Chancery in the heart with a boning knife.

The world sublimated; standing at the kitchen window, Chancery could see everything trembling, crumbling around the edges. Furniture, grass, trees, birds, work tops, next door’s dog, all shivering into fragments.

Everything was ruined.

She hadn’t known what to do.

She tried hugging her. "I can come with you."

"No." Annabel said, disentangling herself. "I love you, but I don’t have the energy to go on like this, looking after you, keeping you safe. I’m not helping you by letting you rely on me so much. It’s best for us both if I leave."

She didn’t even kiss Chancery goodbye, just turned and walked out the door.

Chancery knew she had to stop her. This was absolute, a searing, hot-cold certainty. It sliced Chancery in two and poured acid on the cut.

Chancery stumbled after her, tripped on the doorstep, and fell on her face, smashing her nose against flagstones. The pain was white, explosive, awful but irrelevant. All that mattered was, if Annabel got away, she would become just like everyone else. She would become people .

Chancery couldn’t talk to people. She did her best to avoid them.

Out on the street, people were having seizures, vomiting, screaming, thrashing on the ground. Chancery climbed to her feet, shuddering at the noise slicing against her skin, and tried to help Annabel, but what could she do? Nothing she said made any difference. It was as if Annabel could no longer hear her.

After a while, people stopped screaming and the world turned quiet. Eventually, over the course of several days, they all began to walk. They went to the beach, flocking to the sea in skeins and drifts like slow-motion, ground-trapped starlings.

When Annabel went, Chancery went with her, following the silent masses to the ocean. It was a rare day of heat, the sun blazing, the sea both sparkling and smooth, as if covered in partially crumpled foil. It rolled in an easy, steep swell, fat breakers crashing in spumes of froth like whisked eqq whites. About a mile out, the frequent sea fog they called the Haar was a thick, impenetrable wall of white; an endless roulade of candyfloss cloud across the horizon.

People milled on the beach before aiming for the wall. Once in the water, they floundered in the surf, drowning, unable to swim, unable to stop. Bodies bobbed on the waves, a grotesquerie of marker buoys, and lay puffed and bloated on the beach. Crows squabbled with seagulls over a surplus of glistening, crimson ribbons of flesh. The stink of rotting meat and seaweed coated Chancery’s tongue like a mouthful of rancid fruit drenched in iodine and soy.

"Wait!" Chancery grabbed Annabel, clung to her. She pulled away, drawn to something out at sea, just like the other people, oblivious to the corpses. Chancery started after her, but she was already lost.

Chancery collapsed, bones baking. She had visions of them caramelising, could almost smell the roasting marrow. She squeezed fistfuls of sand until it hurt.

When she saw Hedron, he was blurry: a shape, a shadow in a heat haze. He wandered over, taller than any of the people, and she couldn’t tell whether they made room or he passed right through them.

Prickling tendrils burst from high up inside her nose and shot through her brain, a snort of sour fizz with a chilli heat. "Hello," he said. "Aren’t you going with them?"

She tried to answer but couldn’t.

He bent down, cupped her face with hard, spindly fingers, and blew gently on her parted lips. The coolness of his breath on the moistness of her mouth penetrated to her bones, replacing the marrow-deep fire with a detached calm.

She looked up, and he was pulling his hat firmly onto his head. It was covered in a layer of granular soot.

She sat, arms almost too weak to push against the soft sand. "She said I couldn’t. I lost her. I didn’t know what to do. Then you came." She looked at her hands, thinking there should be some sign she nearly roasted from the inside. "You made me better."

"You wouldn’t have been able to speak to me if I hadn’t, and you’re the only one who tried."

She turned to watch people falling like skittles in the surging waves. "All those people ," she said. "They’re dying."

"I know. I don’t know why."

"They’re going into the sea."

"What’s wrong with the sea?"

"They drown."

More prickling, ticklish rather than painful this time.

"All right. We’ll keep some of them. They can help me keep you safe."

Chancery picked up a dead crab and made its legs waggle, then frowned at the opaque horizon. It was so quiet. So peaceful. Her limbs relaxed outwards, as if she were a trussed chicken and someone had cut the string. "Do we have to?"

Hardly anyone escaped, Hedron had said at the time, pleased with himself. Bones still lay in bleached white drifts of fragments on the beach, barely recognisable after five years of winter storms. The Haar remained, never straying further than around three miles out, no matter the weather, although sometimes it came all the way in. Chancery knew that was when people were trying to reach the island and Hedron didn’t want them to.

Armed coastal patrols kept Britain in internationally ratified quarantine. Only the Oilers were allowed to land. Their Aberdeen Harbour compound was the one place still accessible. Three years after the Walk they’d surrounded the docks with an electric fence and doused everything in chemicals before resuming work there. Maybe they really needed the oil.

Although she’d never been inside, Chancery bartered with them, with Hedron’s help. Gourmet meats and preserves, jewellery she’d found—things they couldn’t afford where they lived—for rifle ammunition, flour, and spices. She’d asked Hedron not to infect them and he’d agreed, as long as they kept bringing her things, didn’t leave their compound, and she didn’t tell them about him.

He wanted her to be happy. Cooking made her happy.

She gave them jars with lids sucked tight and tupperware containing gold and gemstones swimming in bleach, which they had her drop into plastic bags she wasn’t allowed to touch. They weren’t to know the real reason they were safe.